richard nixon

PPM Picks: OUR GANG

June 29, 2018 By Andrew

By Andrew Hager, Historian-in-residence

PPM Picks is a weekly feature offering film, book, or music recommendations from our staff. The links provided in the article go to product listings on Amazon. Purchases made using these links support the Presidential Pet Museum. That said, we were not paid to review or promote any of the items mentioned. We just legitimately like them.

Imagine, if you can, a president who justifies war crimes, attacks America’s allies, condemns politically outspoken professional athletes, and enrages the Boy Scouts. Difficult, I know.

Meet President Trick E. Dixon, the star of Philip Roth’s scathing 1972 satire, Our Gang. Dixon is a scheming, sweaty doppelgänger for, of course, Richard Nixon. Roth’s takedown–written in the form of a play, with stage directions and dialogue–goes beyond superficial parody and into hilarious absurdity, following its own logic to almost insane depths of cruel brilliance. Very few satires have a better claim on the adjective “Swiftian.”

When I first read this fifteen years ago, I was impressed by the dark belly-laughs and Roth’s prescience in gutting Nixon before Watergate, when the president was widely popular in the country at large. Our Gang, despite positive reviews upon publication, had little cultural impact. It was overtaken by real scandal and considered a minor work in Roth’s highly esteemed bibliography. In 2003, it was funny but (arguably) dated.

How times have changed! As the Absurd has supplanted Reality in American politics, Our Gang has gained relevance yet again. Dixon is deranged and self-serving, unwilling to admit defeat even as his position becomes increasingly untenable. Certainly the parallels between 1972 and 2018 would have been apparent to Roth. Even a cursory reading of the book’s summary underscores the terrifying truth of that. The novel deserves anothee chance. So does the country.

PPM Picks: REPORTER

June 8, 2018 By Andrew

By Andrew Hager, Historian-in-residence

Seymour Hersh is one of America’s foremost investigative journalists. His work–particularly his efforts to uncover military misdeeds at My Lai and Abu Ghraib–changed the course of American foreign policy. Hersh has been a thorn in the side of the powerful for almost sixty years, an example of journalistic integrity who never traded honesty for access.

Reporter, his just-released memoir, recounts his career with surprising detail and candor, chronicling both high points (Watergate) and mistakes (failing to report on President Nixon’s abuse of his wife, Pat). Like any journalist, Hersh cultivated connections with major players in the arenas he covered, and he used those associations to find stories. The inside information he gathered spills out of his book, offering a wealth of fascinating anecdotes for politics and history junkies.

The book recounts Hersh’s early days as a copy-boy hoping to work his way into the newsroom, as well as the various pieces of good fortune and kind advice that propelled him forward. Some of his biggest triumphs came down to lucky breaks–people who let vital information slip or inadvertently confirmed something they didn’t understand. The massacre at My Lai, for instance, came to light in part because a high-ranking military official assumed Hersh knew more than he actually did and blurted our the name of William Calley, who led the butchery.

Of course, uncovering scandals does not endear one to the powerful. Hersh worked on Eugene McCarthy’s anti-war presidential campaign in 1968; his political leanings were well known. Henry Kissinger (and others) viewed him as an adversary. Reporter discusses the impact a known bias can have on a story and the pains a good journalist will take to confirm facts to protect the work from accusations of political motivation. The story must be true above all else. If your mother says she loves you, Hersh writes, verify it.

We live in a precarious time for the media. Most newspapers lack the budget to pay for in-depth investigative reporting or for foreign correspondents. Cable news offers little more than a platform for partisan debate. “Hearing both sides” takes precedence over relaying the unadorned facts. Reporter acknowledges the dire state of current affairs. It offers no prescriptions to cure our ailing Fourth Estate, but it feels like a blueprint for the sort of tenacious truth-seekers a democracy needs.

PPM Picks: MEDIUM COOL

February 14, 2018 By Andrew

By Andrew Hager, Historian-in-residence

About halfway through Medium Cool, the two central characters, hardened cameraman John and single mother Eileen, watch a television documentary about the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. She is devastated, but he has seen this sort of thing before.

He explains to her the familiar process used by the media in times of tragedy to draw viewers in and provide a superficial expression of National Grief. Nothing is learned. No problems are solved. The ratings are high, and that’s what matters.

Medium Cool is a blistering critique of American media (among other things), but it’s not a satire in the vein of Network or Wag the Dog–it’s a hybrid of drama and documentary footage shot on location in Chicago during the spring and summer of 1968. Actors mingle and converse with real people. Writer-director Haskell Wexler developed his characters and his story, then took to the streets to see what would happen with these fictional people in real situations. Early on, John (Robert Forster) and some real-life cameramen discuss whether it’s more important to help an injured person or get good footage. It’s not played for dark laughs. This is serious.

Wexler guessed correctly that the Democratic Convention, held in Chicago that August, would be a circus of demonstration. His shooting script called for Eileen to roam through the protests in search of her lost son.

The filmmakers weren’t the only ones anticipating trouble. Early on, we see John “filming” actual training exercises of the Illinois National Guard, who practice gassing Guardsmen pretending to be angry hippies. There’s a sense of dread underpinning the action.

What no one foresaw–not Wexler, the National Guard, or Chicago Mayor Richard Daley–was the violence of what would really happen at the convention. Wexler and his small crew followed actress Verna Bloom as she made her way through crowds of demonstrators. We see white-helmeted Chicago police looming in the background. We know what’s coming, even as the actress and the filmmakers can only guess. There are taunts and orders shouted over bullhorns, and then s tear gas canister flies directly at the camera. (A voice shouts, “Look out, Haskell, it’s real!,” because it actually is.) This is the world as a movie set, history going off script. What the filmmakers capture are scenes from what was later dubbed “a police riot.” The streets of Chicago appear indistinguishable from those of Prague just a few months earlier, when the Soviets crushed the budding Czech protest movement.

1968 was a traumatic year for America, a time when everything seemed to be falling apart. During pre-production on Medium Cool, Dr. King was murdered. During filming, Robert Kennedy was killed. The optimism of the early 1960s was a charred wreck by the time the Convention riots happened. Standing there with a camera was Haskell Wexler. Some critics might compare him to the callous photographers more concerned with good footage than the wounded victim. Such an analysis misses the point.

Medium Cool is his call for help.

PPM Picks: APOLLO 13

February 7, 2018 By Andrew

By Andrew Hager, Historian-in-residence

Quick! Without looking it up, name the crew of the second team of astronauts to visit the surface of the moon.

History is never kind to second place, and if it weren’t for the catastrophic accident that derailed his moon mission, Jim Lovell would be just a footnote in the history of space exploration. After all, his was the third trip to the moon, and even though it had been less than a year since Neil Armstrong took that giant leap for mankind, the world was already bored with space.

Ron Howard’s 1995 film Apollo 13 begins as the story of a man on the verge of losing his dream. Lovell (Tom Hanks) is scheduled to fly on Apollo 14–if Congress doesn’t cut the funding first. The race to the moon is over. The Americans have beaten the Soviets. Why keep spending? When he’s offered the chance to command Apollo 13 instead, Lovell grabs it. He is going to the moon, and though he won’t be the first, he’ll still stand on a rock 238,000 miles from Earth, something practically unthinkable two decades earlier.

Fate is cruel to Jim Lovell. It refuses to allow him even that glory. Four days into the flight, 200,000 miles from Earth, an electrical glitch triggers an explosion that costs Lovell’s crew most of their oxygen and most of their power. He will never walk on the moon, and if everything doesn’t go just right from here on out, he won’t live to return to his wife and kids, either.

Suddenly, the largely ignored crew of Apollo 13 is the center of attention. The world is watching, but this time no one expects things to end in triumph. Lovell and his crew have to work with the scientists in Houston to jerry-rig their wounded spacecraft so it can bring them safely home.

Apollo 13 succeeds on two fronts–as a piece of recounted history, sure, but more importantly as a human drama. The all-business atmosphere at Mission Control (featuring excellent work by Ed Harris) is balanced by Kathleen Quinlan’s pitch-perfect turn as Lovell’s wife. Hanks is solid as ever, and his interplay with trapped colleagues Kevin Bacon and Bill Paxton feels real, not amped up for the big screen.

It’s been over sixty years since the Russians launched Sputnik into space, and almost 50 since Armstrong trod the lunar dust. In that time, we’ve pulled back from the promise of the Kennedy era (fulfilled, ironically, by JFK’s former adversary, Richard Nixon). The US government has allowed its budget for space exploration to dwindle. Perhaps the recent launch of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy–a preparation, we are told, for a trip to Mars–will inspire new generations to reach out into space. Apollo 13 should remind us that no space flight is routine. We mustn’t lose our capacity to marvel at our achievements, or stop trying for more.

Lessons from Teddy Roosevelt

January 30, 2018 By Andrew

By Andrew Hager, Historian-in-Residence

Working at the Presidential Pet Museum a fun job, particularly for a person like me who loves history. One of the best things about the work is the chance to really dig into the presidents’ lives, to better understand the men who have shaped this country for good or for ill.

Of course, some presidents are more interesting than others. How much can you say about Chester A. Arthur? He had horses and some cool facial hair, but that’s about it. His legacy is limited to some civil service reforms that would fit in a footnote in a history textbook. (I anticipate a few angry pro-Arthur emails for that.)

Not so with Theodore Roosevelt. With TR, you have a larger-than-life personality, a man who barreled through life with the exuberance of a dozen lesser men. I would wager that at the mention of his name, most of you probably pictured a barrel-chested and mustachioed man in a cowboy hat waving a big stick and yelling “Bully!” while standing next to a lion he had just killed with his bare hands. Sure, it’s a caricature, but it’s not too far off the mark.

Here was a man so tough, so resilient, that when he was shot in the chest while campaigning as the presidential nominee of the Progressive (or Bull Moose) Party In 1912, he refused medical attention and gave a ninety-minute speech with blood seeping onto his shirt. He began this speech by saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot, but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.” (Meanwhile, if I feel myself getting a hangnail, I’ll be cutting this post short.) I could probably cite that incident as proof enough that you can overcome any obstacle with enough determination and grit, but in fact, Roosevelt was even more remarkable.

When he was a young child, Teddy suffered from debilitating asthma. At night, his sleep was sometimes interrupted with asthmatic attacks so severe that he felt as if he was being smothered to death. Doctors had no cure, and his parents were, as any of us would be, terrified. Young Teddy was certainly frightened, too, but he was determined not to let his fear keep him from doing what he wanted to do, and, oh, there were a lot of things he wanted to do. He taught himself taxidermy and created his own museum using animals he had hunted. He traveled with his family to Europe and Egypt. When he was eleven, he hiked through the Alps with his father, which is no small feat for a person with asthma. He took up boxing to strengthen a body he believed was too weak. This youthful love of adventure and activity carried him the rest of his life, even through that would-be assassin’s bullet.

Yes, the sickly little boy made himself physically strong by sheer force of will. And maybe I could end my rant here and everyone would get the point I’m trying to make, but there’s more to TR’s story than that.

In 1884, what should have been one of Roosevelt’s happiest moments became one of the darkest he ever experienced. Two days after giving birth, to their first daughter, his wife died of kidney failure. The symptoms of her illness had been masked by her pregnancy. That same day, his mother, who was living in the same house, died of typhoid fever. In his diary that evening, he drew a large black X on the page with a brief notation: “The light has left my life forever.” He was 25 years old.

Roosevelt decided to charge forward. He threw himself into public life. In ten years, he was the head of the police commission for New York City, where he worked at ending corruption and increasing standards for the hiring of officers. Seven years after that, he became the President of the United States. His life exemplifies Newton’s law that objects in motion tend to remain in motion. Or, as his friend Henry Adams remarked upon TR’s death in 1919, “He was Pure Act.”

How difficult it is for most of us to act at all! I find myself putting my goals off for two, three, maybe even four years, as lesser ambitions distract me. When it comes to long-term focus, I have the perseverance of a cat watching a laser pointer. I run here, scamper there, and end up pouncing on nothing, Then I do it again.

I’m not alone. As you’ve probably heard, a reported 92% of Americans fail with their New Year’s resolutions. We represent that other Newtonian idea—that objects at rest tend to remain at rest. We get frustrated with the results of our efforts, and we stop. Anything that makes us uncomfortable is avoided. We seek comfort and ease above all else.

This is not good for us or for our community. If we never risk failure, if we never dare to flop, we will never experience real, gratifying success. As Richard Nixon said in his final address to the White House staff in 1974,

We think sometimes when things happen that don’t go the right way; we think that when you don’t pass the bar exam the first time… We think that when someone dear to us dies, we think that when we lose an election, we think that when we suffer a defeat that all is ended. We think, as T.R. said, that the light had left his life forever.

Not true. It is only a beginning, always. The young must know it; the old must know it. It must always sustain us, because the greatness comes not when things go always good for you, but the greatness comes and you are really tested, when you take some knocks, some disappointments, when sadness comes, because only if you have been in the deepest valley can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain.

I don’t mean to make it sound like we are in full control of our own destinies. After all, Teddy Roosevelt didn’t ask to get shot before he gave that speech. What we are in control of is the way we respond to the forces more powerful than us.

I do not think we need to become, like Roosevelt, Pure Act. In a lot of ways, that’s foolish. If you are shot in the chest, for example. I would encourage you to seek immediate medical attention, even if it means cancelling your plans, no matter how important you think they are. Roosevelt believed in a masculine ideal that does not fit with the way most of us see the world. He believed that bravery in battle was the highest virtue, that war was a good way to test one’s spirits. That Romantic idea died with the First World War, and should have died sooner.

Rather, I would encourage you to learn simply to move forward thoughtfully, with joy, toward your goals, practicing and failing and trying again until you are happy with where you are. It will be stressful. It will not, most often, be fun. You will be battered and bruised. Don’t let go of hope. Keep moving. And when you do accomplish your goals, take a moment to see how far you’ve come. Stand on the peak of that mountain and look at the valley from which you have just climbed. Celebrate. And then push onward.

PPM Picks: ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN

December 20, 2017 By Andrew

by Andrew Hager, Historian-in-residence

It’s the holiday season, which means it’s time for Important films to give us Messages on Weighty Themes. The studios save many such films for the end of December, hoping awards-season voters will take note.

One 2017 Oscar hopeful is Steven Spielberg’s The Post, which follows Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) and publisher Katherine Graham (Meryl Streep) as they decide whether or not to publish the Pentagon Papers and make an enemy of President Richard Nixon. I haven’t seen The Post yet, but its subject matter and characters cannot help but remind me of another film about Nixon-era journalism, Alan J. Pakula’s 1976 masterpiece, All the President’s Men.

All the President’s Men begins with the botched break-in of Democratic headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in June 1972 and follows reporters Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) as they doggedly uncover the roots of the crime. Those journalists, you probably know, worked for the Washington Post under the editorial direction of Ben Brsdlee (played here by an Oscar-winning Jason Robards). They eventually uncovered enough dirt to end Richard Nixon’s presidency mid-term.

it can be difficult to present well-known events onscreen, but the film’s most impressive attribute is actually its understated, straightforward storytelling. There are no car chases or explosions or pop songs or romantic interests–just journalists making phone calls, interviewing sources, typing, and conferring with their bosses. The filmmakers chose to remain faithful to history, without massaging the facts for the screen. It works brilliantly. What could have been a deadly dull docudrama builds both tension and paranoia, with cinematographer Gordon Willis’s striking visuals adding an extra layer of menace to the proceedings.

All the President’s Men rewards repeat viewings. The subtle script, the chemistry between Redford and Hoffman, and the great supporting cast provide ample pleasure, especially if you haven’t seen the film in years.

Of note is the Special Edition blu-ray which Warner Brothers released a few years ago. It has typical features–trailers, vintage interviews, an insightful feature-length commentary track from Redford–but there’s a substantial bonus, too. The second disc contains a full-length documentary called All the President’s Men Revisited, which contextualizes the movie and provides a concise, powerful recounting of the entire Watergate scandal. The film’s stars appear (Redford narrates), but the true focal point is President Nixon, seen in archival footage and speeches but, more importantly, heard on tape. For those of us born after his resignation, it can be difficult to separate the president from the caricature. Here he feels more complexly human than anywhere this side of Oliver Stone’s brilliant Nixon (but that’s a movie for another essay).